If you can read this instead of a 500, 522 or 524 error, you're lucky.

Frankly, I've had it with Hostgator. Their performance and support response time was previously exceptional, but after this week I have even less hair left than I had previously. They've taken the site down numerous times for resource allocation issues, and now we're under temporary throttling again. I'm lucky if I hear back from support in less than 12 hours, and after taking every step they requested this issue is still happening.

So, we've begun the long, drawn-out and painstaking process of moving FTO to a new server with a different web host. Be patient with us throughout the weekend, for there will be continued periods of downtime. I'm hopeful that by the end of the weekend this process will be complete and you'll no longer be experiencing these issues.

Right now I'm trying out several, but leaning toward Eleven2. Unfortunately the site is rather large, thanks to attachments to both the news section (photo with every story) and forum attachments. They've been very responsive, unlike Hostgator which I'm lucky lately to get a response from to a ticket within 12 hours. It's a big job. Bluehost, however, is on my list.

Nope, not going with Bluehost -- it just reeks of the issues that I'm experiencing with Hostgator support. I suspect that the latter just got too big and they haven't expanded their personnel infrastructure to keep pace. For example, I requested a full site backup (for transfer to the new host). They finally responded and executed the request 12 hours later.

Initial observations of Bluehost are similar. I had some initial questions for the sales department and initiated a live chat -- I was placed in a queue with an estimated response time of 5 minutes. While that's better than Hostgator, which is running 20+ minutes on a live chat right now, Eleven2 have answered all of my chat initiations, both sales and tech support, immediately. On open tickets they're responding in +/- 15 minutes, compared with Hostgator's 12-hour average. That's just the kind of responsive customer support that I expect.

Files are being moved as we speak. Then it's just a matter of testing everything to make sure that it works, tweaking things as necessary and throwing the switch. Thus far, Eleven2 is making that process as painless as possible.

(Because the database for these forums has already been backed up, this response and any subsequent replies will disappear once the nameservers are routed to the new web host.)

WE'RE BACK!!!!! Eleven2 started dropping the ball, so we're now operating on a spiffy new VPS at WiredTree, with CDN services from CloudFlare. The staff at WiredTree could not have been more helpful or more speedy in getting us up and running. We've found what we were looking for. Full deets are at http://www.firsttracksonline.com/2013/11/19/were-back/

So sorry that any messages posted to this thread after Saturday have been deleted by the move, but that was unavoidable.

I should have added that we're still messing around with everything and trying to break something. If you see something that's not working the way that it should, please let us know via a reply to this topic. Thank you.

Also, one casualty of the move is our affiliated website, UtahSkiAndSnowboard.com. It was an offshoot of FTO that contained only news relevant to the ski industry in Utah, and nearly every story posted there also appeared on FTO. It was built on a now-abandoned CMS, Zikula (formerly Postnuke), and the migration broke it horrifically. As that site never truly gained any real traction it isn't worth trying to diagnose and fix, and as a result it's been folded back into FTO, to which the former website's traffic is now being directed.